A recent article on the Edutopia website follows Peter Lourie as he visits various schools in New York state. At each stop, students can’t help but be swept up by Pete’s enthusiasm and charisma.

At the Bronx Charter School, when Lourie plucks his quintessentially unhip brown crusher hat from his backpack and plops it on his head, the students howl with laughter. They roar when he lopes across the room with his canoe resting on his shoulders, his head hidden from view. But then the mood changes. Lourie begins talking about his childhood — how sad he felt when his parents divorced, how his dog was hit by a truck before his very eyes. And here he imparts a remarkable discovery.

“I wrote a poem about the death of my dog,” he tells the kids. “And I realized that I could take sadness and pain and turn it into beauty by writing a poem.”